I am pleased to, somewhat belatedly, make available another draft of a TAG
finding on The use of Metadata in URIs [1,2]. An earlier draft [3] was
reviewed at the TAG's Face to Face meeting in Vancouver in October of this
year. Most of that draft was considered ready for publication, but a few
changes were suggested (see F2F minutes at [4]). The draft published
today is intended to address the changes requested.
Most of the changes were straightforward, including:
* Removing the good practice note from section 2.2
* Changing several occurrences of the word "identify" to URI
* Fix Stuart Williams' email address in the front matter
* Fix various typos
The substantial change requested involves section 2.8, which had been
titled "Malicious metadata". Comments from TAG members on the original
[5] included statements to the effect of "that's exactly backwards
from the story we want to tell" (constructive feedback is always welcome),
and "we want to talk about the general confusion users have about the
mappings from URIs and served media types to platform file naming
conventions". There was also a sense that we want to make clear that when
a file is saved from the Web to a local OS, the appropriate default
mappings should be from the authoritative media type of the served
representation to suitable equivalents on the platform. Other
correspondents on this mailing list expressed similar concerns.
A couple of weeks ago I sent an email asking for clarification of some of
TAG members' concerns [6], but having received no responses, I've gone
ahead and redrafted based on my own understanding. If this requires
further rework, that's not a problem from my point of view. Of course,
I'd like to believe that we're (finally) getting ready to publish this
one. So, the new draft includes a complete rework of section 2.8 [7]. It
bears the new title "Confusing or malicious metadata". I only wrapped
this up a few minutes ago, and it needs some proofreading. I think it's in
good enough shape to be worth reviewing.
Please accept my apologies for sending this so shortly before today's
call. Maybe it will prove simple enough to discuss on short notice, or
else we can discuss next week after TAG members have had time to read it.
In any case, you can quite safely jump to the new section 2.8 [7] if
you're attempting a quick read before the call. The other changes are low
risk, I think.
Noah
[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31-20061107.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31-20061001.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2006/10/04-tagmem-minutes#item02
[5]
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31-20061001.html#malicious
[6] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2006Oct/0057.html
[7]
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31-20061107.html#confusingmalicious
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Noah Mendelsohn
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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